Things to do in London this weekend (October 10-11)

The BFI London Film Festival today presses play on 11 days and nights of movies, big and small, at cinemas and venues across London and cities across the UK. Now in its 70th year, the London Film Festival is the UK’s biggest film fest – an annual showcase for the best in premieres, new movies, restored works from the BFI archives, short films, virtual reality experiences, screen talks, panels and parties.

As you’d expect, most of the big premieres are already long since sold out, but there’s still plenty of stuff to see and do for London’s more spontaneous (or less organised) film fans; nab tickets for one of the VR and XR experiences in the LFF Expanded programme, spend some time exploring the drop-in games lounge, and immersive installation Red the Ocean Around U, or head to a free DJ night in the BFI. And don’t forget that you can always queue up for returns, too!

Marianne Elliott’s in-the-round production of Edward Albee’s 1962 masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is so intimate – not to mention intense – that after a while the thrill of Gillian Anderson and her co-star Billy Crudup being a couple of metres away is replaced by a sort of horror, a sense that we are physically in the room for the madness. Miriam Buether’s living room set is both impressively tasteful and ominous. It belongs to George (Crudup) and Martha (Anderson), a history professor at a mid-tier American university, and his wife, who is the daughter of the college’s president. Alone together in the opening scene, they bicker and snipe. But that’s nothing compared to the hell they unleash when George’s new younger colleague Nick (Josh Dylan) and his wife Honey (Phoebe Horn) swing by. This is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? filtered and distilled and thrust in our faces. 

If Tate’s 2025 programme was big on the 80s, then 2026 is all about The 90s! Following on from a major Tracey Emin retrospective at Tate Modern, its sister gallery Tate Britain will host a blockbuster autumn show about British art, fashion, photography and pop culture in the final decade of the last millennium. It’s curated by none other than former British Vogue editor Edward Enninful OBE. Expect flashy photography from the likes of Juergen Teller, Nick Knight, David Sims and Corrine Day, iconic looks from Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen, and era-defining artworks by Damien Hirst, Gillian Wearing, and Yinka Shonibare.

Tucked away in a tatty Victorian courtyard in Stoke Newington, Cloudstreet quietly opened at the tailend of summer, headed up by chefs Georgia Lahiff and Frank Guest. Despite being surrounded by the shady palimpsest of historical British livery, Cloudstreet seems as if you’ve stumbled across a small bistro in a medieval village in the south of France. The restaurant (and kitchen) is sequestered into a brick-lined tiny stable with flaking paint on the walls and hastily erected shelves. Dishes are simple and few and far between, but there’s heart and soul and the freshest of produce in every one. The six daily-changing options (including a dessert and cheese course). The undeniable dish of the day is a fleshy pork tonnato with a honking, hearty sauce and a lightly pickled pile of green beans. There’s nowhere in London we’d rather eat. 

Taking place across The Place, Sadler’s Wells, the Barbican and online, the massive annual contemporary dance festival returns to London this October, bringing groundbreaking artists from South Africa, Brazil, Lebanon, Britain and the Netherlands. Spanning live performance, artist talks, film screenings and more, highlights include Dance is Not for Us at the Barbican Pit, a rare UK performance from Lyon-based Lebanese choreographer Omar Rajeh. Legendary British choreographer Akram Khan will be in conversation with Kevin O’Hare, director of The Royal Ballet alongside English National Ballet lead principal Erina Takahashi and first soloist James Streeter. South African dance artist and recipient of the 2026 Venice Biennale Silver Lion Mamela Nyamza will be in town to put on a brand new work at Sadler’s Wells East. Plus much more across the month. 

Alejandro G Iñárritu’s matryoshka doll of an eco-disaster movie Digger is Tom Cruise’s much-heralded Return To Proper Acting. He stars as the larger-than-life Digger Rockwell, a Texan oilman hoping his personal vet can keep his beloved but disgustingly necrotic cat alive a little longer. He’s buried beneath prosthetics and gives a cartoonish, if thoroughly enjoyable portrayal of alpha-dog machismo and ‘drill, baby drill!’ enthusiasm for the black stuff. The screenplay, by Sabina Berman, Jez Butterworth and Alexander Dinelaris, swiftly presents Digger with the consequences of all his drilling and plundering. It’s uncomfortable, it’s bombastic, but don’t listen to anyone who tells you it isn’t funny.  

Your landlord might disagree, but there really is no excuse for boring white walls. Pick up original work from local artists to brighten up your bedroom for as little as £100 at this accessible alternative to (the many) stuffier and more expensive fairs on the London art circuit. Over 150 independent artists will be exhibiting work at the annual event at the Truman Brewery, presented by Saatchi Art. There’ll also be immersive installations, performances, creative workshops, DJs and a fully stocked bar to entertain you. Tunes will be supplied by notorious Ibiza club night Manumission and London based collective Club Lune Bleue. Think of it as art served with a side of party.

This revival of 1924’s Hay Fever starring Richard E Grant is glossy comfort theatre – a frothy number about the eccentric game-playing of the bonkers family, the Blisses. Guesting American Christine Baranski brings a pleasingly doleful turn to matriarch Judith Bliss, who must play hostess (of sorts) when each of the four Bliss family members invites a guest to stay without telling anybody else. Charles Edwards is beautifully hapless as Richard, nominally invited as the guest of acidic daughter Sorrel (Ophelia Lovibond), but actually using it as a front for his designs on her mother. The evening’s best and most original performance: Lucy Karczewski takes overwhelmed flapper Jackie (David’s guest). Big star Grant, is perfectly suited to the role of David Bliss, the self-absorbed novelist who sees everyone around him as grist to his artistic mill.

The American painter Robert Ryman (1930-2019) was a master of minimalism (even though he was reluctant to apply the term to his own work). For decades, he painted his signature white-on-white paintings, urging the viewer to look closely at his brushstrokes in all their tactile glory, and to enjoy the subtlety and nuance of the varied effects he achieved. His works aren't often shown in the UK, and this Barbican exhibition will be their first major airing in over 30 years. There'll be 60 paintings on display spanning his sixty year career, in a contemplative tribute to this influential artist. 

The Bayeux Tapestry is one of the most extraordinary examples of medieval craft that we can still see today. It’s 70 metres of cloth that has been intricately hand-stitched with dyed wool yarn to recreate the infamous Battle of Hastings and experts reckon it took a team of skilled embroiders anything from several months to a few years. So, don’t expect to be able to recreate it at the British Museum’s Bayeux-focused medieval making evening. However, you can expect to pick lots of new crafty knowledge. There’ll be workshops to help you with knitted or crocheted pieces you’re already working on, a chance to create your own extravagent medieval inspired headwear, an opportunity to add embroidery to add to collaborative textile collage inspired by the tapestry’s trees and, when you’re all crafted out, a medieval pub quiz with the Weird Medieval Guys. 

The feature debut of Molly Manners, the British filmmaker serves up a barbed coming-of-age satire, diving into the choppy waters of female friendship and rivalry against the backdrop of a girls’ boarding school in Yorkshire. There’s dry wit laced throughout Succession writer Miriam Battye's script, as the adolescent bond of best friends Minna (Galaxie Clear) and Flic (Marni Duggan) is tested by anxiety, ego and jealousy over the course of a school year. Theirs is a toxic codependency: they eat, sleep and breathe together, share the same likes, dislikes and life goals. A glimpse of a Nokia 3210, minimalist threads and needle drops from Shanks & Bigfoot and Belle and Sebastian suggest a 1999-early 2000s setting, with pops of bright colour, tight camerawork and intimate two-shots encapsulating the immature echo chamber Minna and Flic inhabit. It underscores the ignorance of youth and the melancholy of displacement.

Is getting a drink with an ex always a bad idea? If the aim to create the chaos and drama befitting a side-splitting one-act play, well: you might be onto something. Debuting in London after runs in New York and Los Angeles, Douglas Lyons’ Table 17 is dependent on people making bad, often unjustifiable, choices. Decisions are made, and details are revealed that elicit audible boos from the audience. Directed by Tony-winner Zhailon Levingston, Table 17 is unafraid to conjure these big emotions – and big sounds – from its crowd. The show flips from laugh-out-loud hilarity to genuine tragedy in minutes, changing costumes and switching timelines at equal pace. It’s a stylish and exhilarating theatrical experience, jolted forward by three powerful, emotive performances. This is a piece of theatre that’s heartfelt, hilarious, and honestly challenging. 

This revival of Jay Presson Allen’s 1989 Truman Capote monologue was initially staged in the stunning House of the Redeemer in New York, the sort of opulent old Manhattan building of your wildest dreams. How would a London transfer work? A huge part of the joy of the London Tru is how designer Paul Farnsworth has transformed the entire Menier space into a faithful recreation of Capote’s New York apartment. Jesse Tyler Ferguson offers a funny, often very poignant channeling of the Alabama-raised author and socialite. That distinctive voice could so easily fall into parody, but Ferguson brings Capote to life, aided by the fact that the play is set at a very painful time in his life. Rob Ashford’s production is very classy indeed. It’s a very enjoyable tribute, beautifully staged.

Best known for his eye-popping, fantastical fashion photography for titles including British Vogue, i-D, W, Vanity Fair and Another Man, British photographer Tim Walker has spent the past five years photographing the nation’s LGBTQ+ trailblazers in preparation for this major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. His first show in London since the V&A’s acclaimed exhibition in 2019, it will be accompanied by a book featuring contributions from Travis Alabanza, Russell T Davies, Shon Faye, Lisa Power and Joelle Taylor.

Colleen Hoover is Gen Z’s Nicholas Sparks. This erotic psychothriller Verity. Dakota Johnson slips pleasurably back into Fifty Shades of Grey mode as Lowen Ashleigh. A penniless writer, Lowen is offered a financial lifeline when she’s paid big bucks to secretly ghostwrite the next instalments in a bestselling series. Its author, Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), has been incapacitated by a mysterious accident. So it’s Verity’s hot, rich husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) who invites Lowen to stay at their remote glass-box mansion in snowy Vermont, where Verity lies mute, immobile and apparently catatonic. Or is she? Mostly a wild and fun ride, director Michael Showalter plays Verity’s somewhat deranged tone just right. 

One of the buzziest late night shows of this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Soul Sewage is Sam Eley’s debut hour as Basil Crumbwick – a horny, embittered old man with a papier maché head. Both uncomfortable and hilarious, it’s recreating some of that Fringe magic by being staged about as late as Soho Theatre goes, or at least it is for its initial October run. That’s now sold out, but Eley (and Basil) will be back for another crack at it in January 2027.

London’s art lovers go mad for a bit of French Impressionism, so it’s a little surprising that the capital hasn’t hosted an exhibition on one of its leading figures, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, since the National Gallery’s 2007 show on his landscapes nearly 20 years ago. It’s excellent news, then, that the Trafalgar Square institution will once again be hosting a major exhibition dedicated to the master painter next autumn. Created in partnership with Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Renoir and Love will focus on the most significant and prolific years of the artist’s career, from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s. Opening in October 2026, it will feature several of Renoir’s most iconic works, including  the 1876 painting Bal au Moulin de la Galette, exhibited for the first time ever in the UK. 

London Month Of The Dead’s annual programme returns this spooky season to get you in the mood for Halloween with a programme of more than 60 fascinatingly macabre events investigating our city’s relationship with death. The line-up offers a plethora of ghostly tours that will take you around crypts, cemeteries, undertakers, execution sites and other eerie locations across the city, alongside talks exploring everything from Victorian child bereavement to anthropodermic leather. Highlights of this year’s programme also include a bat skeleton mounting workshop, a magic shadow show in West Norwood Cemetery, a five hour immersive forensics workshop, a screening of eerie classic The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari with live piano accompaniment by Stephen Horne, and creepy Halloween festival A Danse Macabre. It doesn’t get more gothic than that! 

Playwright and novelist Partrick Hamilton’s interwar trilogy of novels Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky sketch the energetic jazz clubs or bohemian underground bars that beam against the growth of inner-city poverty in London between the 1920s and 1930s. This adaptation by multi-award-winning dramatist Simon Reade sets itself up to thrill. Ella Dawson (Rosalind Lailey) cleverly plays a quiet and empathetic barmaid who pines after Bob. And best of the bunch is the wily, mysterious and devilishly charming Ernest Eccles (Michael Maloney). There are moments of sheer brilliance: magical jazz dancing, moments of intoxicated rage and touching scenes of youthful discontent. It's a must-see for any theatre-goer who likes to be glum with this cast of broke, drunk, city-dwellers who like to spiral and make all the wrong decisions. 

Korean pop culture has won our hearts over the last decade or so, but how much do you know about the country’s history? The British Museum’s new exhibition dedicated to the east Asian country includes sculpture, painting and decorative arts spanning over two millennia from around 300 BC to the present day. The show is a deep dive into Korean creativity, and according to the museum, “presents the most comprehensive chronological survey of Korean visual and material culture seen in Europe for over 40 years”. Look out for National Treasures including ancient gold body ornaments and Buddhist icons, as well as 12th- and 13th-century celadon-glazed stoneware, evocative ink landscapes and contemporary works responding to the turbulence of the 20th century. It’s a collection that’s never been seen in the UK before. 

Painters have been being dazzled by the glorious natural light and sparkling azure sea of the French Riviera for centuries. This autumn, you’ll be able to feel like you’re taking in the sea air on the Côte d’Azur from London, as the Royal Academy brings together artworks depicting the French southern coast from greats including Monet, Braque, Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Renoir and Klein. Spanning the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and Modernists, Painting the French Riviera will not only transport you to the SAD-beating coastline, but explore how the riviera was inextricably linked to the rise of modern art. 

Tony and Olivier Award-winning English artist and stage designer Es Devlin gets her first UK museum show this autumn. The Design Museum’s landmark retrospective will delve into the stories behind the London-based designer’s 30-year practice encompassing everything from kinetic stage sculptures to monumental art installations. Developed in close collaboration with Devlin – who has worked on everything from the Olympic opening ceremony to the Superbowl half-time show – it will feature rare maquettes, sketches, annotated texts and process materials, as well as new large scale installations conceived especially for the exhibition. 

In his latest paintings, Pakistan-born, New York-based artist Salman Toor explores the struggle and desire for belonging, both culturally and emotionally. Bringing together 19 of the artist’s paintings, some of which have never been seen in Britain before, this is Toor’s first solo exhibition in Europe and will be full of work deeply rooted in his personal experiences, as well as inspired by an admiration for the Old Masters, especially in Baroque and 18th-century painting. 

Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill gallery will be filled with apples, hats, pipes and clouds this autumn as it hosts a free exhibition on Belgian surrealist René Magritte. A first major London exhibition of Magritte’s subverside artwork in more than 30 years, it will feature works on paper, sculptures and photography from Magritte’s four-decade-long career, many of which have been loaned by museums and private collectors. These include ‘La Lampe Philosophique (The Philosopher’s Lamp)’, made shortly before the International Surrealist Exhibition that took place in London in 1936, and last displayed in a landmark Magritte exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) 20 years ago. Gagosian’s exhibtiion will also explore Magritte’s legacy via works created specifically for the exhibition by several contemporary artists, including painters Harold Ancart, Allison Katz and Dana Schutz. 

New-York based artist Autumn Knight constructs installations and performances inspired by her background in theatre and psychology. In I Can’t Complain, her first major presentation in the UK, she explores the act of complaining and the ways in which it can be cathartic, frustrating and politically empowering. At the centre of the show is an audio installation that collates coversations about everyday irritations, exposing how minor things like food quality can be indicative of deeper inequalities. On select days (October 1,12 and 15), Knight will be in the space for solo performances that delve further into the concept of complaining, asking questions about who gets to complain? And how are those complaints received? 

Nominated for Best Newcomer at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Comedy Awards, Freddie Meredith’s Need a Light? is a by all accounts delightful hour of sketch comedy in which Meredith plays a nerdy, wannabe hip loser who spends 60 endearing minutes trying to start conversations with randoms in the smoking area of a club.

English artist Jenkin Van Zyl is known for his immersive installations that cast you into unsettling scenarios. Enclosure is set within a decaying facility where tourists could temporarily inhabit the lives of others. He’s created a whole world where people could renew or terminate their doubles and sees Mercy, a starlet who lent her likeness to the programme, arrive to terminate her contract, where the process begins to collapse. The work asks pertinent questions about the systems we create for ourselves and the human need for self-preservation. It’s a large-scale work where visitors move through ‘facility’, past fairground signage, holograms, inflatable cocoons and decaying ephemera. 

Charge the steins! You don’t have to travel all the way to Germany for a lederhosen-clad knees-up this Oktoberfest – and you don’t even have to wait until October. Munich’s world-famous beer festival is very much on in London and the celebrations begin in September with big steins of beer, platters of excessively long wurst and loud oompah bands blowing brass like they don’t give a schnitzel. Oktoberfest began over 200 years ago, as a mammoth wedding party for a Bavarian prince and princess. It turned out that beer, bratwurst and all-round silliness were a match made in heaven, so now it's an annual excuse for everyone to cut loose as autumn approaches. Whether you’re after a traditional take on the event or drag queen-led partying, authentic Bavarian beers or east London craft IPAs, you can find the perfect Oktoberfest for you right here in London. You're sure to get a warm willkommen at one of these London Oktoberfest events. 

Once again, Regent’s Park will be taken over by sculptures this autumn to coincide with the Frieze art fair coming to London. While tickets to the fair can cost up to £250 and are usually reserved for the collectors, dealers and creators of the art world, Frieze Sculpture is totally free to visit and gives a chance to the proles to get a peak at some contemporary artworks in the open air. Fatoş Üstek will curate the exhibition for the fourth year in a row. This year, instead of viewing the sculptures in isolation, the display is curated as a web of interconnected objects, linked together with materials, stories and communities. Highlights will include Angel Otero’s threshold-like doorway descending beneath the grass, and Tarini Sethi’s intricate stainless-steel screens depicting utopian scenes.